A little dyke music.

I was so nervous, my whole body was sweating. It was 1978, and I was very newly out to myself and standing in line on a hot May afternoon to hear a "women's" concert in the cramped second story of a tiny brick building near the Harvard Law School. I had never in my life been surrounded by such a mob of joyful, in-your-face, and carelessly overt dykes--hugging, laughing uproariously, crowding the room physically and emotionally, jammed together on the ledges of open windows, on benches, on the floor, along the walls.

There was a roar in that place and in my ears before the room quieted and someone took the stage. I can't remember who it was because my memory was overpowered and burned away by the passion I felt hearing women's music for the first time.

It was hot and raw, triumphantly honest, and sexually defiant. It talked openly about loving women. The audience wept and roared and stamped their feet, and I was frightened by the intensity of my own feelings, completely joyful and, most of all, flee. All the women in that room were embraced, empowered, ratified, shaken, set flee. It was transformative.

This was women's music, a music that, in its ten-year heyday--in the 1970s and '80s--sold more than a million records without any promotional radio airplay, sang to more than 100,000 women at women's music festivals, reached at least 100,000 more during the 1976 Women on Wheels concert tour, touched tens of thousands more at hundreds of other concerts, and left an indelible mark on all of us who heard it, who sang it, who danced to it, and who made love to it. There was so much power in the honesty of it, it has never, to this day, left our souls. I can still listen to Cds Williamson's The Changer and the Changed and be renewed. And I guess I'm not alone--it still sells thousands of units a year.

Holly Near wrote "Imagine My Surprise" after falling in love with another singer-songwriter, Meg Christian, and became one of our champions, as much because of her strong themes of social conscience as for her musical talent. That combination of social-change politics and art infused the fledgling lesbian movement and became one of the gifts we brought to the unified gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender movement.

In addition to the singers, whom we all referred to by their first names--Margie and Holly and Meg and Cris--the music also created an entire new generation of entrepreneurs and activists, lesbians who were not welcome in any traditional music system unless they were in the closet. WILD, the Women's Independent Label Distribution Network, was the cardiovascular system for about 18 artist-owned labels and record companies, such as Olivia and Redwood, and was completely underground for years.

The concerts and road trips were organized by a new generation of producers, more than 100 of them. The festivals, beginning with the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival in 1976 and spreading nationwide, quickly became a continuing Amazon Woodstock, with thousands of women gathering, with or without clothes and politics, to meet, sing, listen, and teach each other about spirituality, politics, organizing, power, and art.

My ex and best friend, Torie Osborn, cut her entrepreneurial and business teeth on this work, partnering with Holly to build Redwood Records, producing and organizing festivals. During one Michigan festival, Torie and other producer types fled the vegetarian, naked, leather thong with Swiss Army knife-wearing throngs for a restaurant in Hesperia, Mich. When the 15 braless, Birkenstock- and shorts-clad women hit town, one resident opined, "These must be the executive ones; they're carrying briefcases." Today, these same women are running non-profits, radio stations, and other businesses.

There are fierce strains of the power of women's music today in the works of Tracy Chapman, Sheryl Crow, k.d. lang, and Melissa Etheridge. Sarah McLachlan's edgy and successful Lilith Fair has given a new form to the genre. But the early melodies linger on.

The accompaniment was sometimes thin, the technical prowess sometimes reminiscent of garage recording, but something in the melody, in the words, in the hot, true center of the music cracked open our hearts in a blissfully unhealable way, and we were the changers and the changed.